Liberal Meltdown

Three things happened over the last two weeks that raises the curtain on just how much chaos there is among Democrats.

Last week, the Washington Post reported an absolutely astounding statement made by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. She was asked by reporters about the anger of the liberal base over the Democrats’ failure to end the war in Iraq.

"Look," she said, her frozen smile turning into a frozen frown. "I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk."

Sounds like liberal heaven. But wait! There’s more:

"If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have "Impeach Bush" across their chest, it’s the First Amendment."

Absorb the stunning nature of that statement. This is liberal-on-liberal violence.

Speaker Pelosi complained that antiwar liberals 1) invaded her private space, 2) ticked off her neighbors, 3) set up "protest camps" outside her home, 4) made her life inconvenient with their antics. Of course, all of that was fine when they were doing it to President Bush outside his home in Crawford, Texas.

Furthermore. I thought liberals embraced the downtrodden, but Pelosi wants to see those homeless folks sleeping on her sidewalk removed for loitering.

What would Jesus do?

She’s also seething over a primary challenge against her by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan. She called Sheehan’s and others’ targeting of Democrats "a waste of time."

Again, the Democrats were more than happy to have the lefties’ support when things were really grim in Iraq and they could use them as surrogates to beat up the president. Now that Iraq is improving somewhat, the Democrats have nothing else in their repertoire, so they are turning on each other. They made use of each other when things were bad for the nation and thus good for them. Now they are throwing each other overboard faster than you can say "Jim McDougal."

More proof:

Last Friday night, Bill Maher was heckled during his live HBO show. The offending audience member stood up, unfurled a smuggled-in banner, and began shouting loudly. Maher, unaccustomed to being eclipsed, stormed the stands and helped security throw the guy out. What was the heckler heckling about? Why, he was shouting part of the extreme left-wing agenda: that September 11 was a U.S. government conspiracy.

Maher was livid that his show had been interrupted. But his “shock” is ridiculous. After the incident, he said that a lot of anti-war and anti-Bush protesters hang out outside his studio, waiting to engage him on conspiracy theories and the president’s war criminality. Why do they stir outside Maher’s studio and not, say, Larry King’s? Because Maher has spent the last four years criticizing the president, the war, and other post 9-11 policies. He has given aid and comfort to the protesters by supporting their arguments — and their right to heckle the president. He has embraced them, winked at them, given them tactical air support every week on his show.

Why then would he be surprised that any of them would show up at his show and yell it all, loud and proud?

Now that Iraq is improving, the anti-war protesters have outlived their usefulness to folks like Maher and Pelosi. Once convenient tools with which to bash the president, they are now inconvenient, smelly, loud beasts that need to be escorted away.

Neither Maher nor Pelosi should register disgust or feign shock that these people are still around, agitating their lives. They created them. They cultivated and encouraged their craziness.

For four years, it was all okay because they directed their insanity toward the president. Now that the craziness is directed toward them, they want them silenced.

Even more proof:

On your dime last week, Congressman Pete Stark (D (of course)-Calif. (of course) claimed the president was a sadist: "You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement."

In other words, the president gets his jollies by ordering our servicemen and women into harm’s way to kill for the heck of it. It took Pelosi a whole day to “rebuke” Stark, and only because his comments sparked widespread outrage on talk radio and other conservative outlets.

And the Democrats wonder why they haven’t been entrusted to run a "hot" war since Harry Truman.

Not only have they proven themselves weak and incompetent on national security, but they have also shown that they are increasingly desperate. Iraq is slowly and steadily improving, the president just sustained his veto of their attempt to expand the SCHIP entitlement, and they lost their ridiculous stab at attacking Turkey for a genocide that happened 100 years ago. Their laughable lashing out is symptomatic of the Democrats’ losing their grip on power, control, and reality.

They are flailing. And the amusing consequence is seeing them doing exactly what they accused Bush of doing: shutting down their own agitators and telling them to watch what they say.